“Dear Mr. Sparks: Thanks for your interest. I feel somewhat guilty to have to tell you that the phrase “blue corn moon” has no actual meaning in Indian lore. I made it up because I liked the sound of it.

Its basis is this: In preparation for doing the lyrics to POCAHONTAS, I read a lot of Native American poetry. One of the phrases I came across, in a love poem, was : “I will come to you in the moon of green corn.” (The Native Americans called their months “moons” and named them according to something that happened seasonally, such as the arrival of green corn.)

The phrase stuck in my head, but I didn’t think the lyric : “Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the green corn moon” really worked, because of the association of the moon and green cheese, plus the “ee” sound in it, etc. So I changed it to blue corn moon, which I thought had a nice resonance to it because of the phrase “blue moon” and the fact that there are things like blue corn tortillas, etc.

Even though it’s not authentic, and actually implies Southwestern tribes rather than the Northeastern Algonkians of Pocahontas, I used it in the lyric and it obviously served me very well. This is probably far more than you wanted to know, but that’s the derivation of the phrase, for whatever it’s worth to you. Sincerely, Stephen Schwartz“